An Introduction to Indie Social Media, Part One: The diaspora* Overview
A few behemoths, over a period of only a few years, have conquered and territorialized the landscapes of our online social worlds. Like in a game of digital Risk, companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google have staked their claims on the geography of our minds. They are the new kingdoms of attention — and the businesses and influencers who compete for us on their platforms have become their corresponding feudal lords.
For a variety of good reasons, this makes many of us uneasy. For some, it seems these platforms don’t have enough official regulation; for others, their already-close relationships with government surveillance agencies and business interests appear to foreshadow dystopia. Either way, we’ve put a lot of our personal data in the hands of only a few decision-makers. Anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills should at some point ask themselves: “Why should I trust these people to handle it correctly?”
Diversification is a good insurance safeguard — no matter what the playing field — for protecting one’s safety and assets. Maybe you’re uneasy about the control megaplatforms have over your personal data, as well as over the content you see. But you’re hesitant to quit them altogether — maybe your friend group uses Facebook to schedule events, or you rely on Instagram to promote your artwork, for example. Whatever your situation(unless, of course, you’re quitting social media altogether), it’s a good idea to try out some of the smaller, alternative social sites that are out there. Many of them cater to specific niches, some of them are decentralized or privacy-focused, and a few even allow users to form their own federations and regulatory landscapes. They vary from incredibly user-friendly to requiring more in-depth tech knowledge, and some have options for both. I plan to try out a few different platforms and share my experiences with them; in this article, I’m going to focus on diaspora*.
The diaspora* Project
The diaspora* Project website, found at diasporafoundation.org, describes diaspora* as “The online social world where you are in control”. The website is not particularly beautiful, and it can be kind of confusing to find your way around if you’re not a very tech-oriented person. There’s a lot of information for you to sift through, and it’s hard to tell at first what’s immediately relevant and what’s not. Nevertheless, the idea behind it is incredibly interesting, and I think it has a lot of potential to help people forge a sense of community online. That’s why I’m going to try to break down how it works in this article — so it doesn’t seem so scary and overwhelming.
The diaspora* project espouses three primary philosophies: decentralization, freedom and privacy. Freedom and privacy are probably relatively self-explanatory, but what does decentralization mean? Basically, anyone can host part of diaspora* on their own private server. You can do it if you want. Your friend can do it. A stranger can do it, and you can go hang out on their server. These servers are called “pods”. It sounds a little weird, and it might throw you off if you don’t know what a server is, or what decentralized hosting might mean for your interaction with the network. Don’t let it scare you. You don’t have to know anything about servers to be a part of the network. You do have to choose a pod though, if you’re not going to create your own. And there are hundreds to choose from.
How Do I Choose a Pod?
Explore diaspora*’s available offerings by clicking the “Sign up” button on their home page, or by clicking here. This was another part of the homepage I found confusing initially. There is a section that reads “Choose a pod”, but clicking “Find out more” does not take you to the pod-chooser. It takes you to a document where you can read about the process of choosing pods. This document can be useful, but for a layperson it feels like too much documentation to have to read at the start. I want to just get down to business! You don’t really have to read this. You can just click “Sign up”; if you don’t feel like you’re ready, don’t worry. You aren’t going to have to sign up immediately. You can explore first.
There are two main buttons on the pod-chooser interface. They read “Auto pick a pod” and “Use pod wizard”. If you don’t know much about tech, don’t bother about the second one. It will invite you to pick one of three softwares for the “pod wizard” to run with. To be honest, I didn’t investigate this because for me, this is already off-putting, and I consider myself more willing than the average person to go through complicated steps to achieve what I want. I don’t know what the pod wizard is; it isn’t even mentioned on the “Choose a pod” info documents. I assume most people aren’t going to go to the trouble of trying to figure it out, either.
If you click “Auto pick a pod”, as far as I can tell, you will be redirected to a randomly-selected pod, saving you the trouble of browsing through pods to select one for yourself. The upside of this is you don’t have to make any decisions, but the downside is you could be directed to a pod oriented toward Japanese-language users, for example (assuming you don’t speak Japanese) or some other community that doesn’t really match your style or spark your interest. It doesn’t really matter, because you obviously don’t have to sign up for that one. You can go back and auto pick a different pod, or you can actually browse through the existing pods to find one that appeals to you. You can search for specific kinds of pods in the search boxes above any of the info columns, but this may not actually be helpful, because pods don’t always indicate in any obvious way what kind of communities they hold. However, this isn’t like reddit, with different sub-communities always rallying around a particular theme. Sometimes they are themed, but sometimes they are simply mixed communities of people.
So, how are you supposed to choose, then?
First of all, you can lower your choice burden significantly by specifying a country in the dropdown box under the “Country” column. You can narrow down your potential communities to servers hosted in your own country, thereby roughly ensuring that you won’t have to sift through tons of pods in languages you don’t understand. By narrowing my country to the US, for example, I lowered the number of available pods from 564 to 194 choices.
Another way to do things is to organize the existing pods by numbers of users. Click the arrow next to the “Users” column, and you can organize in order by the highest number of users and go through them one by one. Open each one in a new tab, and see what you find. The first one (I still have my servers narrowed down to the US, by the way) appears to be the original diaspora* network, with 94,453 users at the time of this writing.
The next one, with 26,962 users, is called Natural News. It is the network and server run by the Natural News website. It looks very similar to the diaspora* page, and in fact I’ve seen a few pods using this template; it appears, perhaps, to be a default template.
The next one is called Diaspora* Brazil and, as you can see, our method is not perfect; the server is hosted in the US but the site is in Portuguese and obviously geared toward Brazilians. Fair enough. But the pod is called diasporabrazil.org; you could have guessed that, couldn’t you?
The fourth one is called Pixelfed and is a photo-sharing social site. This is the cleanest, most beautiful-looking pod we’ve looked at yet, and it rests as early proof that diaspora* social communities can look and feel more like what we’re used to seeing in the social world.
This one seems really cool, and will resonate with Medium readers, as a social site for writers and publishers. It is not free though; there is a free unlimited “trial” version, but it looks like it caps you at 25 posts; otherwise, it costs $6 a month for Pro membership.
Not all diaspora* pods with significant English-speaking bases are hosted on US servers, however. In fact, some of what I think are the more interesting ones are found on servers outside of the US. I’ve reset my server options to anywhere, and still have them arranged by the highest number of users. One of the bigger ones that comes up is Mastodon, a multilingual network modeled after Twitter and hosted on a French server:
Poddery, with 5,158 users as of this writing, is hosted on a server in Germany. One of the reasons for that, they say, is to avoid surveillance. Their Indiegogo campaign summary reads:
Poddery was one of the the earliest diaspora social networking host that was launched by Joe Bivins. Now we are running the service for past 6 years. We added Matrix and XMPP services using same username and password in past years. We are trying to run alternatives to Facebook, Whatsapp, Google chat with privacy protection. Our sole purpose is to run the services for communication so we won’t monetize your data like big corporates do.
Then you have PeerTube, a YouTube-esque social site hosted in France, and focused around video sharing:
Now we’re getting down into the less-than-1,000-users space. There are a lot of similar-looking or “duplicate” sites, changed slightly or focused on a different niche. And, of course, some of the more fringe and potentially NSFW sites are down in this zone as well.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing for you here. For example, a duplicate form of PeerTube called Scitech.Video focuses on (you guessed it) science and tech videos; it currently has 109 users. Social.isurf.ca is a clean-looking, Facebook-like network with 847 users and some interesting conversations. Lunarpunk.space is another blogging platform with only 107 users. And Lesbian.energy is a social network focused on LGBTQ+ with a mere 21 users. There could be benefits to joining a smaller community, such as getting to know people on a deeper and more intimate level, having bigger relative influence with little effort, and being able to help create the culture of a pod as it grows.
To test it out, I decided to join the original diaspora* instance — the one with the most users. You can mention people, use hashtags, and it looks like there’s even a chat feature for your contacts. diaspora* recommends searching for hashtags as a way to start connecting with people. So, I searched for the hashtag #linguistics.
I saw a couple interesting posts or conversations that I might like to participate in. It looks like there is a decent amount of long-form content here, as well. But it will take some more experimentation and interaction before I really get a feel for what it’s like to use the platform.
Conclusion
After exploring diaspora* and its network of “pods” a bit today, I see a lot of potential in the federation and its platforms. Part of what’s great about it is that, if you don’t like any of the current sites available, you are perfectly welcome to create and integrate your own. But as often happens with pioneering tech and data frameworks, the people who create the networks tend to be more tech-savvy than design-savvy. Many of these pods lack a lot when it comes to building a friendly, clean and sleek user interface. And that will drastically affect the way people perceive their accessibility.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be great places to diversify your online social experience. In fact, many of them actively welcome code contributions and allow people to help them build and improve their sites. And, for all I know, behind some of the more boring, templated homepages I encountered, there could be some vibrant and flourishing communities. At any rate, I hope that in this article I’ve made the concept of diaspora* a little more accessible, and perhaps inspired you to look deeper into the world of alternative social media platforms, in general. Many of them are designed by people with much more tech acumen than the average user. They often assume a basic comfort level with computer science or development, but usually don’t actually require it. Nevertheless, they can be peppered with lots of opaque terminology, and can appear ugly, difficult to get started with, and confusing to learn your way around. But perhaps, with a little introduction and first-hand experience, I can make some of them seem less overwhelming — and open up some new doors to help you take your digital connections back into your own hands.
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Declaration of Non-Conflict of Interest: This post is not an advertisement; I am not affiliated with the diaspora* federation or any of its member pods; I was not paid or asked to write this post. I wrote it simply for informational, tutorial and discussion purposes, of my own accord.
